Many forms of abrasive materials are available for stripping out or buffing surfaces to a smooth finish and/or high gloss. These materials include sandpapers of various weights and grades, wire brushes, emery cloths or the like, and steel wool. To use any of these abrasive materials, the abrasive material is moved relative to the article or to the surface to be finished. For many do it yourself consumer type buffing projects, there is nothing better than old elbow grease in manually creating or causing this relative buffing movement.
However, many power tool devices are available for holding certain of these abrasives for allowing powered applications of them. Thus, an electric drill can be used with its rotating output to power rotate for example a rotary wire brush or a sanding pad or buffer. These items, the rotary wire brush, sanding pad or buffer are available as accessory items for just such purposes. Also, a belt sander is a common power tool, using a special endless sanding belt that is trained over a pair of spaced rollers and is rotated by one of the rollers to move unidirectionally against the article or surface to be finished. A further variation of a sander is the vibrating sander, where a platen is power oscilated back and forth, in a straight line or a tight orbital path, and a piece of sandpaper is held to the platen to be moved then relative to the article or surface to be finished.
It is noted, however, that there are few power tool devices suitable for powered manipulation of steel wool. The characteristics of smoothness or abrasiveness in steel wool, for example as compared to a sandpaper, is most significant and consequently the substitution then of sandpaper for steel wool can not be readily made. Steel wool can be used effectively on wood, metal, glass or ceramic, and even plastic or composition materials.
Steel wool itself is a composite mass of a plurality of finely and randomly woven or stranded wires, typically of steel, where each wire strand is of such fine cross section as to offer only minor resistance against bending and where a great multitude of such strands are grouped together in a rather loose or pillowy mass or pad. This pillowy nature makes it somewhat difficult to chuck or hold the steel wool relative to most power tool devices. Nonetheless the random crossing of the pillowy strands create a very beneficial abrading action against the surface where it is desired to remove impurities from or roughness from the surface.
Thus steel wool can be used in stripping a surface of paint, varnish or the like, and the stripping action requires random back and forth movement of the steel wool relative to the surface. Further, a metallic surface of brass, copper, chrome or the like frequently can be buffed up with steel wool to remove rust, tarnish or the like from the surface. However, steel wooling in the main has been handled manually and is very tiring; which is not totally satisfactory in this advanced age of the machine and other work saving devices.